


The Damnedest Thing

by objectlesson



Category: The Lone Ranger (2013)
Genre: Drunken Kissing, First Time, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 05:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3884866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/objectlesson/pseuds/objectlesson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the damnedest thing, that John’s stuck spending every waking second of his life with someone he can barely stand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Damnedest Thing

**Author's Note:**

> I hold the extremely unpopular opinion that this movie is surprisingly radical, gloriously anti-American, and critical of systematic violence/capitalism. I love it and have seen it numerous times and cry every time. I do think it was a bad choice to cast a white actor as a native character, and I do think there is a lot wrong with it, but I also think it was really easy to write off for that reason, in spite of its otherwise fantastic politics. If you want, throw me to the flames, I don't care. It was in my top favorite movies of 2013. 
> 
> I never thought it was super slashy, but I read all of the lovely Vulcanodon's fics and was inspired to contribute. They do make a pretty cute couple.

It’s the damnedest thing, that John’s stuck spending every waking second of his life with someone he can barely stand. He’s not even sure how he ended up here, inextricably tied up with his crazy Indian and his mostly dead bird. He’s not sure why he keeps doing it, day in and day out, riding across the great, dry sprawl of Texas with Tonto at his right hand, Tonto and his soot-black eyes, his back so straight it’s like a compass needle, pointing forever north. 

It seems like some giant fluke in the universe that John could end up relying so heavily, so _desperately_ , on the same man he has very nearly killed or been killed by on more occasions than he can count. _Why in the hell_ , he thinks often, staring incredulously at the mysterious tangle of hair and beads ratted at the back of Tonto’s skull as he rides ahead of him, _why in the hell did I choose this?_

The answer is always the same, echoing in John’s head but in Tonto’s voice, because he’s heard it come from him so many times. _You didn’t choose. It chose you._ And there’s it is. The truth, like Tonto, cannot be ignored once John lets it in. He cannot return to false justice, he cannot return to the lie of the law, the lie of the government, the lie of manifest destiny, the lie of _America._ He’s stuck here, counting the feathers in his sometimes-friend and always-partner’s mess of hair. It cannot be ignored. 

There’s nothing _keeping_ him wearing the mask, there’s nothing _keeping_ him outside the law. Tonto certainly doesn’t have a tomahawk pointed at John’s spine or anything. It’s something in _him_. Some willful acceptance of this should-be-lonely fate, some intentional resignation that this is where he belongs. Riding off into the copper burn of the sunset each night, sand in his teeth, Tonto’s steady gaze boring silent holes into his back like he can see through to the yellow of his insides, the yellow he’s always trying to outrun, or at least stain red so that it is unrecognizable.

It’s the damnedest thing. But it’s what he’s damned to. That’s the thing about the truth. He can shed blood over it, ignore it, drink it away. But it doesn’t change that it’s _there,_ real because he believes it. And the truth is that he’s not actually _stuck_ spending every waking second of his life with someone he can barely stand. The truth is that he _likes_ it. He wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s the damnedest thing. 

\---

Some days, when the desert is particularly sweltering and John’s eyes sting from his own sweat and everything shimmers along the horizon like a mirage, he suspects that he died a long time ago. Died back in Colby, died on that train, died chained to Tonto, crushed to death by a solitary poetic locomotive with his wrist bound in iron. 

Tonight he’s thinking about death, drinking with Tonto as the sun sets. He keeps clambering around the perimeter of the fire to avoid the billow of black smoke, but as soon as he settles down into a new place, the wind changes and he’s choking again. Now he’s too drunk to move so he just sits there, nursing whiskey straight from the bottle now, using its bitterness to kill the taste of ash in his mouth. “Do you ever wonder if you’re actually _dead,_ ” he slurs, watching Tonto through the flicker of flame. “And this is all just a dream, your life flashing in front of your eyes before it just...snuffs out?” 

Tonto studies him, eyes their usual, unreadable black. John swallows thickly, thinking, _that’s tar pit black, the kind you get stuck in_. It’s a stupid thing to think, a stupid, pointless, reckless thing, so he looks away. 

“Drunk men say things they regret,” Tonto says after awhile. He’s sitting propped up on his elbow, knees sprawled apart and bare heels dug into the earth, and John’s tracing over the lines of muscle in his abdomen before he realizes he’s staring again. He rubs his singing eyes with the heels of his hands, and wonders why this splinter keeps digging itself deeper, instead of festering out. 

“Maybe. Dunno. It all....just seems too crazy to be real, you know? Spirit-walkers, Silver. You,” he tries to say, smooth and even, but his voice snags over the word _you_. Tonto’s face doesn’t change, so he keeps going. “Maybe it’s _not_ real, and I’m actually just _dead_.” 

“You talk very much for dead man,” Tonto tells him, twisting onto his stomach and stretching an arm out so he can wrestle the remaining half-bottle of whiskey away from John, brow furrowed in some kind of exasperation, some kind of disapproval. Some kind of something. John can never tell what Tonto is thinking, he can’t read tar pit-black any better than he can speak Comanche. Their fingers grapple then brush, hot with sweat and dirt, and John keeps coughing on smoke. 

“Enough,” Tonto says firmly once he successfully robs John of his drink. Then he takes a swig of it himself, head thrown back against the night like the red line of a plateau in the distance, and John cannot help thinking about the fact their lips have both touched the same glass bottle-neck. The thought makes his stomach gather and ripple, a sick snake of heat contracting in his gut like something alive. 

“I thought you said enough,” he murmurs thickly, eyes half-lidded and burning. 

“For you,” Tonto states, regarding John with muted judgement. He jams the bottle into the sand, working it into a divot like he’s digging its grave. His eyes do not leave John, who’s splayed messily beside the fire, drunk and stupid and eating the smoke that keeps following him around, wondering how in the hell someone can have eyes like that, how in the hell if he’s not in hell. If he didn’t die back in Colby, chained to Tonto. He looks away, wondering about that splinter, wondering about a lot of things,  
\---

Tonto’s horse is stolen somewhere outside of Cuero, so John is stuck riding double with him, Silver aching and huffing beneath their combined weight. 

“We’re gonna break my horse, can’t you just walk for a _few miles_ , look at him he’s frothing,” John complains over his shoulder where Tonto is seated neatly behind him, palms resting evenly on his own thighs because his balance is superhuman; he doesn’t need to hang onto anything to stay centered. They have been alternating back and forth between holding the reins, and when John’s not up front he has to grip Tonto’s waist with one arm and keep his other hand jammed down onto his hat to prevent it from getting blown away into the desert. It’s undignified; he knows it, but it’s better than falling off his own mount.

“Great Spirit horse can carry five men,” Tonto scoffs. Then he leans forward, very much into John’s space, and stoically pats Silver’s neck. 

John grits his teeth, ignoring the brush of Tonto’s sinewy bicep against his own shoulder. “Okay, fine. But you’re the one traveling by foot if he gets a sore back, alright?” John says through his grimace. 

Silver snorts, and then the snort turns into an amused whinny, and John can _feel_ Tonto smile behind him, the infuriating twist of his mouth like a sickle moon. He frowns at the feeling which sparks and blooms inside him, a drop of blood spreading in water. He hates that this, whatever it is, is happening to him more and more often and without any control, these strange, wild bursts of sensation, of _sickness_. It makes him hate Tonto, it makes him want to pin him to the sand by his throat. 

Determined, John jams his heels into Silver’s sides, nudging him into a quick, collected trot. For a horse from another dimension, Silver doesn’t have the smoothest gaits in the world. John doesn’t like sitting his trot without a saddle, but he’ll stomach the jarring bounce if it makes Tonto fall off, flail to find a grip, _anything._

Tonto doesn’t pitch forward like John would in an identical circumstance. He hardly does anything, his legs tightening minimally around Silver’s barrel and one palm inching forward onto the flat plane of John’s stomach for the briefest of moments before he regains his impeccable balance and releases him, thumb hooking into his belt loop but nothing else. 

“Don’t fall,” he says very seriously, breath too close to John’s ear. 

The desert swims for a moment, mirage hazy, and John wonders when he turned into the kind of guy who chose to endure this type of bullshit. It chose you, Tonto’s voice echoes, haunting, and John’s incredulity turns into defeat. 

“We need to get you a horse,” is all he can think to say, tongue in his teeth, color on his cheeks. The unfaltering solidity of Tonto’s chest behind him _hurts_ it’s so real, real and bitter and impossible to ignore, as true as the truth. He hates him almost as much as he wants him. 

\---

John is slumped messily over the bar after a job well done: the Lone Ranger, his trusty steed, and his Indian sidekick having saved the day from the injustice of the American Justice System once again. He’s wearing the mask even though his fingers keep itching to take it off, his skin prickly and too hot beneath it. He keeps looking for Tonto in this dog-like way, eyes scanning the crowd of wranglers and hustlers and hookers all milling about, shouting, dancing. Occasionally he will catch sight of a single black wing extended in an ironic salute, but then it will disappear, and he will down another drink and wonder why he’s doing this to himself. 

A woman sits down next to him after awhile, her skirts gathered up in her hands, cheeks flushed as she regards his mask with a lazy smile. She’s pretty, with deep laugh-lines and hair the color wheat. “Your friend,” she says, breathless, “is quite the dancer.” 

“Tonto?” he asks, raising a skeptical eyebrow. She nods, laughing as she orders a drink, a golden beer which comes sailing across the bar, spilling foam in its wake. “Well,” he says, shaking his head. “He must like you, because I have never seen Tonto dance.” 

She sips her beer, and it leaves a spot of foam on her nose. He gestures to her about it, but she doesn’t understand, mind still swept away by Tonto’s _dancing_ , or something. John can’t picture it, but he tries, and instead he’s accosted with a barrage of unbidden images. That solitary crows wing, the scatter of birdseed, the smell of clay. He shakes his head, like it will get rid of the things he can’t stop thinking about, like he hasn’t tried it a thousand times before. 

“So what do they call you? Lonesome Ranger or something? Why you gotta be lonesome if you have that dancing Indian with you?” she asks. 

“The _lone_ Ranger,” he explains, even though he shouldn’t care, fidgeting with the edge of his mask. And he doesn’t feel like answering the rest of the question, so he just smiles at her, watches her dot her face in beer foam with each new swig.

“Well, dunno about you, but he sure can dance. Gee,” she says, fanning herself with an imaginary fan. Her smile gets sly and pointed at the edges, and she leans in towards John, like she is planning to tell him a secret. “Have you ever made love to an Indian woman?” she asks, eyes twinkling. 

He chokes, cheeks coloring, head ducking to hide the rising flush. There are a million reasons why this statement is making his stomach twist, and the word _woman_ is not one of them. “No ma’am, I can’t say I have.” 

“Well. I’ve heard they’re great lovers,” she says smugly, leaning back against the bar, idly licking beer foam from the corner of her mouth. “Maybe I’ll find out tonight, huh?” 

“Maybe,” he responds, out of courtesy, though his intestines are still writhing. He doesn’t like the generalizations she’s making any more then he likes what she’s implying, but he forces a smile, knowing none of this is his goddamn business. 

She reaches out and tips his hat to her, pulling it down playfully over his brow. “See you around, Lonesome Ranger. Thanks for saving the town.” 

Once she’s gone, he orders another drink, and tries to stop thinking about the things he can’t stop thinking about.  
\---

They ride down into a a ravine where some ancient body of water cut a snake-shape into the rock, because Tonto said to. Silver’s hooves keep slipping on the loose layer of chipped shell and gravel, sending him sliding down a few feet at a time on his hooves, and there’s something spooky about the air down here. Half of the things Tonto says are bullshit, but the other half are magic, and fifty percent is a tough odd to reckon with, so John’s stuck trusting Tonto more than he should, more than is good for him. “What’re you doing?” he asks for the millionth time as Tonto hops off his new mare, a short little paint. He strides pointedly to a jumble of earth and crouches to press his ear into a slab of rock like he’s listening for something. 

After a moment he holds up his finger, silencing John. Then he nods to no one in particular, and mounts his horse again. “Looking for someone,” he tells him, like that makes sense at all. 

John is about about to suggest they turn around and head back up the alarmingly steep side of the ravine before night falls and they get stuck down here when a shape appears in the distance, sand-brown and low to the ground. “Well,” he says, squinting at the shimmery tan creature ahead of them, ghost like and eerie. “I’ll be damned.” 

It’s a coyote. It stops a stone’s throw away, ears twitching in the wind and head cocked. Tonto slides off of his horse again and like a beast himself, crawls to the coyote on all fours. Bits of sand, fine and water-worn, pick up in the breeze and adhere to him, to the sweat-shiny stretch of muscle in his back. John watches, dry mouthed, breath held. He’s kind of afraid he’s going to be stitching up a coyote bite by firelight tonight, but he’s also kind of in awe. A mess of combined frustration and amazement summarizes the way he feels about Tonto, on most days. Give or take the gut-deep wrench of longing he’s been fighting with lately. 

A few feet from the coyote, Tonto sits down on his haunches. They regard each other for a long time, speaking in some silent, mysterious language, until the coyote turns, digs a hole, sniffs a rock, and then trots off as if it had never been there at all. John lets his breath whistle out, heart hammering rabbit fast in his chest. “Did you learn anything valuable?” he makes himself ask. 

Tonto stands and and brushes sand from his knees. “This way,” he states, and points back up the side of the ravine.

John tries on a surge of anger, just for a moment, but can’t even manage a step above fond exasperation. He shakes his head, turns Silver around, and urges him back the direction from which they came, Tonto and his new horse following closely behind.  
\---

They’re freeing hostages from a saloon in Abilene when John takes a bullet in the shoulder. He feels it tear into him with a pure, agonizing pain that makes his vision white out before he collapses to the beer-sticky floor, fingers slicked in blood, jaw grit against the inevitable swell of unconsciousness as he lies there, paralyzed. He sees Tonto fell three bandits in rapid succession with his tomahawk, eyes terrifying, all-pupil sinkholes of flint. Then he passes out on the floor of the bar.

The great Lone Ranger wakes up slumped over his horse’s neck, feeling like he got hit by a train, left side of his body one huge, solid ache. He rolls his face against Silver’s mane, strands of coarse white sticking to his cheek as he strains his sore neck, seeing sand, then stars, then, behind him, Tonto’s solid brown torso. “Did we get’em?” he slurs, reaching messily for Silver’s reins and instead touching nothing but night. Tonto slaps his hand down, pinning it, rough fingers encircling his wrist in a crushing grip. 

“Ouch,” John forces out, wincing. He tries to sit up but his body feels full of lead and his shoulder sings in agony, so he flops back down, fighting a wave of nausea while his horse regards him with sidelong judgement. “What’re you looking at,” he mumbles to Silver. 

Tonto holds him down, one firm, calloused palm too-rough on the back of his neck. If John had the strength to he would struggle against it, but he doesn’t, so instead he just tries to _look_ at Tonto, twist his head so that he can cast a glare over his shoulder because he does not appreciate being manhandled when he’s practically bleeding to death out of his shoulder. After some considerable effort he finally meets Tonto’s eyes, and the rage in them silences any protests he may have been formulating, clumsy and pain-slow. He blinks. “Are you _mad_ at me?” he grinds out. 

Tonto rips his eyes away, focusing them on the stretch of desert ahead of him, watching tumbleweed skitter by like ghosts in the dark. “Spirit-walker means you cannot die. It does not mean _try_ to die,” he says eventually, voice all flame and timber. 

John inhales raggedly, mind clouded and prickling with confusion, shoulder immobile with pain. “I didn’t _want_ to get shot, do you think I _like_ this? It hurts and--” Tonto pulls Silver into a halt and the shift in sends needles of agony through John’s body, reducing his words to a stifled hiss. 

Tonto dismounts, pulling John’s good arm over his shoulder and dragging him off Silver’s back, jaw still tight with fury. The whole _world_ smells like Tonto in this moment, clay and spice and sweat and earth, and because pain is wearing at his self control, John says, “ _fuck_ ,” meaning a lot of things in that solitary syllable, his nails digging into Tonto’s back messily. 

“We camp now,” Tonto grumbles, throwing Silver’s sweat-sticky saddle blanket to the sand before he dumps John onto it. He is not gentle and it hurts so badly John would be sure he was gonna die if he wasn’t so sure he _couldn’t_ die. Rolling on the ground he tries to brace himself against the ache, but it is too big, too profound. Tonto drops into a crouch beside him, staring at him like he wishes he _could_ die. “Sleep,” he snaps needlessly, as John is already blacking out. 

\---

He comes to with his teeth chattering and Tonto’s fingers on his skin, which is tight and pebbled with gooseflesh. “What’re you doing,” he mumbles, noticing with a distant kind of alarm that his shirt is off, bloodstained and wadded up beneath his head in a makeshift pillow. His mouth tastes awful, metallic and dirty like old pennies, but he doesn’t have time to think about it because Tonto is sliding a broad palm beneath his skull and lifting his head, pressing the rim of a tin camping cup to his lips. 

Mechanically, he sips and swallows, choking and sputtering on the fierce burn of whiskey. “Are you trying to kill me?” he mumbles, a dribble of spit-diluted amber leaking down into the stubble of his chin, and Tonto thumbs it away roughly, his eyes focused and steady on the crushed shape of John’s mouth, chapped and gasping. 

“Stupid,” is what Tonto says, voice in a hush as he drags his thumb across John’s lower lip. 

John might be dreaming fever dreams; he’s not sure. Or he might have died back in Colby. This is all too strange, his throat is stinging and Tonto is dipping a bone needle in the remaining whiskey, he’s bent over the hole in Johns arm and looking at it with such careful scrutiny it feels like he’s looking past his skin, past the torn flesh, straight through to bone. John swallows weakly, trying to chase away the rising tide of panic. “How bad is it?” 

“Not bad. But bullet’s in deep,” Tonto observes. 

“Are you still mad?” John asks, gritting his teeth as he begins to feel the poke of the needle inches away from the wound, like Tonto is plotting the terrible course into him. He reaches desperately for the whiskey and swallows another burning mouthful, wanting badly to fall into numbness, to dizziness before the inevitable gouge of pain. 

“Yes,” Tonto answers, eyes skittering carefully up to his face before darting back again. John believes him but he at least looks less terrifying, the storm-black of his pupils edging back into a more reasonable, stomach-able brown. They still ache to behold, so he shuts his own eyes, squinting until he sees stars.

“This will hurt,” Tonto tells him. He drags the balled up shirt from beneath John’s head, which he lets thunk down to Silver’s saddle pad, and stuffs the blood stained cotton into his mouth. “Bite down,” he orders. Then gets to work. 

The needle in his shoulder feels like a branding iron being shoved beneath his skin, and John cries out, rubbing his cheek helplessly into the scratchy, salty blanket beneath him, canting his hips up, kicking the air. Tonto digs, fingers firm and deliberate, shoulder braced into John to keep him pinned. 

The whole procedure takes entirely too long, and John is stuck between thinking he’s gonna pass out again and that Tonto is dragging the task on for fun when he hears the tiny click of a blood-sticky bullet hitting the bottom of the metal cup. “Done,” Tonto says. He wipes the wound down with alcohol, a burn so fierce and cruel and pure John lifts his hips up off the ground, bucking madly and Tonto has to hold him down with an elbow, cursing in Comanche under his breath. 

Glowering, he stitches John up, face hidden in his hair. When he’s done, there’s a messy slosh of alcohol, a hiss of pain, and a muted sizzle as Tonto burns the ends of the knotted off sinew with a match. Once it’s all over, John removes the foul shirt from his mouth, jaw shaking, cheeks aflame. “You enjoyed that,” he tells Tonto darkly, side eying him, throat burning with bile. 

Tonto shrugs, regarding John over the rim of the whiskey cup, where the bullet rattles like a coin. Then he fishes it out, examines it, and pops it into his mouth, sucking off the patina of red. 

It’s too much. He can’t handle Tonto doing shit like that on a normal day, but especially not when he’s all jittery and half-mad with post-gunshot-wound adrenaline. He doesn’t have that type of self control. John hides his face, half-drunk on whiskey, more than half-drunk on the fading throb of pain in his shoulder, _sick_ with wanting every single thing from Tonto one person could possibly want from another. “What the hell are you doing,” scrapes out of him, voice a little ragged and a lot dismayed. Through his fingers, he risks looking at Tonto, whose elbow is still pressed into his thighs, holding him down. 

Blunt, dirty nails disappear into Tonto’s mouth as he pulls the bullet from his lips, dropping it back into the tin cup with a clink. “Test for infection,” he says. 

The fire crackles beside them, casting Tonto’s broad, toned shoulders in a flicker of angles and lines, and John wants to press his fingers into shadows, he wants to drag his mouth down the changing mess of light. He wants things he doesn’t even know how to name. _Why in the hell_ he asks himself, palming over the hot, jagged ache of his shoulder. _Why in the hell did I choose this?_

And, as always, the answer in Tonto’s solemn voice. _You did not choose. It chose you._

It all seems very unfair, and something long-suffered finally frays so thin it snaps.“Test for _infection?_ ” John blurts, incredulous. “Oh. Right. That’s it, of course, some fucking Comanche magic.” 

“Yes,” Tonto says. His face doesn’t change much, just a slight darkening around his eyes, maybe, but John could easily be imaging it. Regardless, he doesn’t believe him, not for a second. He wasn’t testing shit, he was just sucking John’s blood off of something because he’s crazy, because he must _know_ what he does to him and it taking advantage of it, playing it, _fucking_ it. John’s had enough. He swallows thickly and tries to sit up, swaying and pitching so heavily he has to shoot out his good arm and brace it against Tonto’s shoulder to keep from falling into the fire. 

“Well. Is it infected?” he asks to try and save face, but his voice comes out all wrong, rough and low and transparent, made all the worse by an involuntary contraction in his hand, which fists down Tonto’s forearm, coming to rest at the sweat-sticky indentation of his elbow, where grit and clay collects like silt in a riverbed. 

The dizziness he wanted before is here, now, too late. Without meaning to he presses his brow into Tonto’s to steady himself in this newly spinning world, he grinds their skin together and realizes he can’t keep his breath in his body when they’re this close, so it comes huffing out of him, stilted, messy. His own eyes are half-lidded, almost closed, but Tonto’s are blown open, scary-wide like the whole night sky just opened up in them. John thumbs into the divots of muscle and sinew of Tonto’s bicep, again thinking _why in the hell?_

Tonto licks his lips. “No infection,” he murmurs. He smells like salt and sun and hell, too close and too hot and John is wondering why he hasn’t pushed him flat on his back again and out of his space when he makes a fist around John’s throat and crushes their mouth together. 

He can taste his own blood on Tonto’s teeth, and for some reason that’s what undoes him. He collapses onto the saddle blanket under a fury of palms, his shoulder singing in pain but he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care. Tonto kisses him like he’s been waiting one hundred years for it, John can _feel_ how bad he wants him. He cannot believe he’s been spending every waking moment of his life with someone who wanted him this bad, without _somehow noticing_ it. Tonto bites him with every kiss, like he can’t keep his teeth out of it, he drags his hands down his bare ribs like he might break him open, like he wants to, like he needs to.

John feels pretty ashamed of his former self-involvement, and his shoulder hurts a lot, but those seem insignificant in comparison to how _good_ the rest of it is. He fits his hands to the planes of muscle framing Tonto’s spine, he drags his nails down and locks their hips together, all while kissing him, kissing him, letting himself be bitten and sucked on and licked into. 

At some point, Tonto pulls away to look down into him with those terrible eyes, lips swollen and shining in the dark. “Stupid,” he says fondly before he drops back down to kiss him, thumb digging so fiercely into John’s pulse his heart flutters. John tries half the things he’s been thinking about nonstop, and a lot of things he didn’t let himself think about, and dreams about the other half he will get to try later tonight, tomorrow, the days after and after that. 

\---

They finish and start and finish again, and sometime after the fire’s faded to a smolder of embers and Silver has stamped away in embarrassment, tail swishing noisily in the distance, John rolls onto his good side and says, “I was so sure it was just me.” 

Tonto lies straight-backed next to him, their ankles crossed, the whole of his body bared to the night and still glinting with sweat and other things. His eyes open, two flashes of obsidian amid so much sand. “I know. Stupid,” Tonto offers. 

“Well. In my defense, it’s hard to read a man who only answers in three word sentences, maximum. That’s a lot of inferring to do, and I’m not in the habit of inferring my friends want to commit illegal acts with me,” John explains, collapsing onto his back again. 

Tonto leans over him, not able to stop looking or touching for very long now that it’s been made clear it’s okay to look, and to touch. He drags his palm down John’s sternum, from his throat to the dusting of golden hair in the valley of his obliques, where he stops to press down, catching his breath which wavers in restraint. “What friends?” he asks eventually, mouth curved up in a sly, half smile when he regards John over his shoulder. 

“Shush,” John sighs, canting up into the heat of Tonto’s palms. 

“Hm,” Tonto says after awhile, palm coming to rest at John’s throat, where he traces the bruises he left there. “I’ve committed very many illegal acts with you before tonight. Think about that.” Then he bends down to kiss the bruises, then licks into them, and then they’re staring again, finishing again. 

Stars glisten somewhere above them but John can’t see, he’s still stuck in the static behind his eyelids, hands wandering, mouth raw, shoulder tender in a way that would be agonizing if he weren’t so preoccupied. 

Tonto’s right. There’s no one _keeping_ him beside the mask, there’s no one pointing a gun to his head, their’s no chain binding them together anymore. Tonto must be here because he _wants_ to be. Thats the truth, stained in blood, for better or for worse. John thinks it’s the damnedest thing.


End file.
